


Matchmaker

by Airelle



Series: Bodie's Cat [2]
Category: The Professionals
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-27
Updated: 2014-05-27
Packaged: 2018-01-26 16:23:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1694756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Airelle/pseuds/Airelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written on January 19, 2014</p>
    </blockquote>





	Matchmaker

**Author's Note:**

  * For [franciskerst](https://archiveofourown.org/users/franciskerst/gifts).



> Written on January 19, 2014

Now I know why I didn’t go straight to Paradise, or Hell, or whatever, as most deceased do. Incidentally, that’s why we don’t meet too many other ghosts. Most go… somewhere else. A few of us remain, because we still have a job to do here, as I did.  
  
That mouse I killed an hour or so before buying it myself… It turns out he stayed because he had a message for me. Yes, I did see him one last time. Being dead is funny that way. You understand a lot of things, and you even speak in tongues! Well, mouse tongue, at least…  
  
The little fellow came to me and said, point blank:  
  
“You have to stay on Earth to atone for your sins (where did a _mouse_ learn such complicated words and concepts? And where did I learn to understand them?) You are assigned to the human William Andrew Philip Bodie to be his guardian angel until the day of his death.”  
  
Guardian angel? That was new, even to me. But it made sense, in a twisted sort of way.  
  
‘O… kay,” I said slowly, wondering what such a job entailed. “Could you tell me a bit more about what I’ll have to do? You do know this one has a very risky occupation? Getting shot at, kidnapped, having live bombs strapped to his chest, knifed, and probably even worse… Guarding him is going to be a bit of a job.”  
  
“If it was easy, he wouldn’t need a _guardian_ angel. His partner, with the curly hair, has had a guardian angel since his teens, and the sandy-haired bloke with whom he did… things… the night you were killed has had one since the war where he got his leg wound. It was deemed fitting that Bodie should have one too. You’ve been chosen.”  
  
 _Duh,_ I thought. _Chosen by whom?_ But I didn’t say anything out loud. That mouse was only the messenger, and since I couldn’t kill him again, seeing that he’d been dispatched to his present ghostly state by my helping hand – or rather, claws – I thought it better to keep my mouth shut. I would learn, one day, who had chosen me, or I wouldn’t, and well, it’s more or less the way I’ve spent all my life, so why should my afterlife be any different?  
  
Still, I could see that guarding this one was, indeed, going to be the job of a lifetime. Or of a deathtime. Whatever.  
I set up shop immediately after that. I came to live with Bodie. Well, if you can call it ‘living’, as one of us was dead. And had the job of stopping the other one from dying before his allotted time.  
  
I must say that, for Bodie, the arrangement was entirely beneficial. He had a live-in cat for whom he didn’t need to provide food, or a litter tray, or to sponge off vomit or vacuum cat hair from all over the place. The only slight drawback being, of course, that he didn’t _know_ he had a cat. But he did reap some of the benefits, because my presence, even in its ghostly form, was soothing. I think I can congratulate myself with the easy continuation of his relationship with ‘George’. I had been there at its beginning, and I was, even if totally involuntarily, the catalyst of that relationship. If that big tough bloke hadn’t shown his emotions the way he did when he saw my corpse – and I’ve learned since then how very strange and unusual that lone tear was, as he didn’t even shed some for his partner when he was dying from a heart wound on the operating table – he and George would never have gotten their act together and discovered that, in fact, they loved each other.  
  
And I do know that Bodie loves his partner – Ray, or Sunshine, or Einstein, or Doyle, depending on Bodie’s mood – as a brother. He just happens to love George in a different, more carnal way. But he’s a deep man, is Bodie, and he’s ready to die to protect both Ray and George. And this makes the job of guarding him very difficult indeed.  
  
I won’t bore you with a detailed account of how I stopped bullets reaching him on several occasions, or on how I managed to prevent his car from crashing or exploding on several others. That time when his phone got more plastic in it than it did that morning, yes, I was there, too, and he can thank me: I was the one who sent a subliminal suggestion to him that he shouldn’t – absolutely _shouldn’t_ – go on dialing. And not only because he didn’t need to set up a date with that ‘Joanna’ person, when he already had George, but for those other, more life-threatening reasons. It gave him pause, and the time he needed to see the explosive and summon his partner on the R/T. That was a close call, let me tell you. Without me, he would have died that day. Well, that’s what a guardian angel is for, isn’t it?  
  
And my job, as a guardian angel, extended to his psychological well-being. A happy bloke is less likely to put himself unthinkingly in the way of mortal danger. At least, not any more than he has to, for someone in his profession. That’s why I nurtured both his friendship with his partner and his love for his boss.  
  
Really, the advantages of having a cat are countless. And my best accomplishment was…  
  
But let me tell you about this one in a bit more detail.  
  
As you know, CI5 agents change flats routinely, about once every year. Me, I can’t see the benefit, as it doesn’t seem to stop assassins knowing where agents live, or killing them somewhere else. But the orders of God and George Cowley are not to be argued with…  
  
Well, I knew I only had a few months to implement my next move, before Bodie was rostered out of his current flat. I managed to find one of my offsprings – I died young, but cats are prolific, as well you know, and I was the proud father of rather a lot of kittens during my brief time on this Earth.  
  
I selected him carefully. He had to look a bit like me, the better to jog Bodie’s memory – but then, most of my male offsprings did, black and white cats being so common. He had to have an assertive personality too, but be mellow enough not to discourage his intended human. When I found the perfect lad, I nudged him gently towards my charge’s flat. It’s a well-known fact that cats, the very young ones or the very old ones, can sometimes _see_ ghosts. My offspring was a bit too adult to see me, but he felt my presence and went to the door where his dad had lost his physical life.  
  
My human saw him immediately.  
  
“What are you doing here, little fellow? Need a bowl of milk? Okay, come here. You look a bit like the one that I… (At this, Bodie’s brow furrowed, and I could swear I saw his eyes mist over.) Oh, okay, come on in, I’ll feed you!”  
  
I had chosen well. My charge named him Sunshine, and he took his cat with him when he changed flats, to his partner’s unending amusement. And I am proud to say that they lived happily ever after, George, Bodie, Ray and Sunshine. Until… but the rest of the story is for another time.

The end


End file.
